USAF COL. Prouty, Operation BLOODSTONE, SS-Obersturmbannführer Skorzeny, & the murder of President Kennedy...

[David Josephs]

9 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

     But, David, didn't Allen Dulles deploy Ed Lansdale to Vietnam, to run Saigon Station, after Lansdale's remarkable success with the Magsaysay regime in the Philippines?

     Nominally, Lansdale was a USAF man, but he was running the CIA's Saigon Station, wasn't he?

If you say so...  I have read things to that effect - his success there was so overwhelming.

Doesn't change where the loyalties lay..  or how the money/supplies were acquired..  or how completely without oversight it was.  But I believe there are very good reasons the CIA is filled with the Military/ex-military.  We are also aware that the FBI "SIS" initiated Legat system, ONI, MID and all the other intelligence acronyms didn't stop what they were doing... 

I guess my point is we don't see a lot of CIA "civilians" on loan to the Military.. Dulles was the first Director not actively in the Military at the time, but, please... if he did not come to that position with the apparatus he created while in the military/OSS, what would have been his value to the Military higher ups who placed Military men as the first Directors?

I hope we begin to see how the CIA was only a piece of the Military Establishment which took steps for their own independence from them thru the accumulation/redistribution of wealth

[W. Niederhut]

9 minutes ago, David Josephs said:

If you say so...  I have read things to that effect - his success there was so overwhelming.

Doesn't change where the loyalties lay..  or how the money/supplies were acquired..  or how completely without oversight it was.  But I believe there are very good reasons the CIA is filled with the Military/ex-military.  We are also aware that the FBI "SIS" initiated Legat system, ONI, MID and all the other intelligence acronyms didn't stop what they were doing... 

I guess my point is we don't see a lot of CIA "civilians" on loan to the Military.. Dulles was the first Director not actively in the Military at the time, but, please... if he did not come to that position with the apparatus he created while in the military/OSS, what would have been his value to the Military higher ups who placed Military men as the first Directors?

I hope we begin to see how the CIA was only a piece of the Military Establishment which took steps for their own independence from them thru the accumulation/redistribution of wealth

David,

     I had the impression that our U.S. Vietnam ops from 1954 to 1964 were largely being run by the CIA.

     Prouty describes a lot of those details in his book on JFK and Vietnam.  He was providing transportation and other USAF services to Lansdale and the CIA people at Saigon Station.

     As examples, Prouty specifically mentions his role in transporting Vietnamese Catholics from North Vietnam to the South, in an op to shore up the artificial Diem regime.  He also mentions Lansdale's order for Prouty to ship Diem a fancy desk, and a plaque describing Diem as "The Father of His Country." 

[David Josephs]

5 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

I had the impression that our U.S. Vietnam ops from 1954 to 1964 were largely being run by the CIA.

I am in no way in position to provide an answer to this.  Again, @Larry Hancock is a much better source.

"Nexus: The CIA and Political Assassination" ... and the works/essays of @Bill Simpich - both members here and both exceeding generous with their time and resources.

We'd simply not know anywhere near what we do without the great work from these two must read author/researchers.

@Peter Dale Scott would be another who helped us understand context on the global stage.

I just wish I could read 10x faster than I do.

Edited July 20, 2023 by David Josephs

[Cliff Varnell]

8 hours ago, David Josephs said:

Google is your friend...  your approach to me here leaves me no interest in resolving your documentary ignorance

Okay.  From the ARRB testimony of James Sibert, emphasis added:

<q>

But when they raised him up, then they
found this back wound. And that's when they started probing with the rubber glove and the finger, and - and also with the chrome probe.  And that's just before, of course, I made this call, because they were at a loss to explain what had happened to this bullet. They couldn't find any bullet.  And they said, 'There's no exit." Finck, in particular, said, "There's no exit." And they said that you could feel it with the end of the finger - I mean, the depth of this wound. </q>

Paul O’Connor’s statement to William Matson Law:

<q>

O’Connor:  So we used a malleable probe and bent it a little bit and found out that the bullet entered the body, went through the intercostal muscles--the muscles in between the ribs. The bullet went in through the muscles, didn't touch any of the ribs, arched downwards, hit the back of the pleural cavity, which encases the lungs, both front and back. It bounced off that cavity and stopped. It actually went down and stopped.  Went through the ribs and stopped. So we didn't know the track of the bullet until we eviscerated the body later. That's what happened at that time. We traced the bullet path down and found out it didn't traverse the body. It did not go in one side and come out the other side of the body.

Law: You can be reasonably sure of that?

O'Connor: Absolutely.   </q>

O’Connor never claimed a bullet was recovered from the back wound.

There is value in repetition — JFK suffered two wounds in soft tissue with no exits and no bullets recovered from those locations during the autopsy.

One trick pony?  Better that than a horse’s ass.

Edited July 20, 2023 by Cliff Varnell

[Larry Hancock]

 I go deeply into who was doing what in Vietnam and Laos in Shadow Warfare - there were considerable operational differences between the two and things changed year by year...perhaps more in Laos than in Vietnam. The CIA played a much stronger role in actually running military operations in Laos, using large surrogate forces.  

Initially in Vietnam Lansdale did function as COS, during that period much of the  focus was on covert ops and dirty tricks in the North...run by stay behind teams. Those were quickly rolled up.  Then the shift was to covert ops against the North from the South, first coordinated by the CIA and then handed off to the US military for coordination after JFK ordered the "switchback" program following after action analysis of the Bay of Pigs. 

Its absolutely necessary to separate CIA covert operations in both areas from the military assistance programs which were sustained by State and the Army;  in many early instances Air Force and Army personnel sent in with their own covers as advisors and even mail drop covers to conceal forces deployed - while actively engaging in combat.

Thanks to David for the kind words but I would be foolish to try to give a simple answer to a very complex question here,  other than Shadow Warfare I would really recommend Richard Schultz Jr's The Secret War Against Hanoi as a source on who was doing what when in terms of covert operations.

That book (and mine) also contain some useful overview information on stay back teams and infiltration/guerilla warfare efforts in Europe following WWII, something being discussed in other threads going on at the present.